Comic-Con

Friday, January 21, 2011

Endurance

I spent the morning comforting a fellow writer who is sitting at a crossroads. As I gave her the reasurrance she needed to go on another day, I realized the information I was sharing was insight into what it really means to be a writer, so now I want to share it with you:

Honey, you are so close. Only six more chapters to go and you are done. If you really bucked down and forced yourself, you could have your first draft within six weeks. You have an outline. You know where to go and now you need to get there!

When I think back to Copper Descent in it's first stages, it makes me cringe. I had to throw out several chapters and re-write them completely, not to mention how many hours I spent revising the others. It was Terrible with a capital T, and it wasn’t even my first attempt. I have taken creative writing courses and worked sporadically for the last twenty years to finally get a sense of my craft. You have been at this for just a little over two years now, your talent lying dormant since high school and I feel that your work is better than my first draft. In order to feel that sense of accomplishment, you need to finish what you have started.

Writing takes patience and a strong sense of self. That is why it is so dangerous to compare your work to anyone else’s, because you lose that identity which makes you original. This is the reason why I will never be able to write fluff or comedy, and that’s okay. I’m not made up that way and have accepted my limitations. It is not okay to doubt your ability, only your fortitude. This is a question I have asked myself countless times and now I will pose it to you… How bad do you want this? Bad enough to keep going when others would quit? Because that’s what it’s all about. Every time you decide to continue, you grow. Quitting is never an option and neither is doubt.

Have you ever heard of an author by the name of Andy Andrews? He spent seven years attempting to publish his first novel: The Traveler’s Gift and no publishing company would take it. They even went a step further, telling him it would never be published because his writing was crap. He mortgaged his house and self published, believing in his dream that much. This book was the first self-published story to ever make the New York Times Best Sellers List. I assure you he had doubt every step of the way. In fact, one of my most favorite quotes come from this man. “You can’t always make the right decision, but once the decision is made, you have to go about making it right.” You don’t change your choice, you follow it through to the end, and that way, you will never look back with regret.